Goodman Games has Approved Our First Product!

Greetings Adventurers!

Happy, joyous news! The good people at Goodman Games have approved our first DCC adventure: The Tower of the Mad Mage Mazdor™ for release. Soon, it will be available through Drive Thru RPG. I will be sending it to the printer this week and hopefully by February there will be some physical copies available from Goodman Games, a few FLGS in Austin, Texas and maybe a convention near you!

I want to say thanks to the great people of the DCC Community who helped me bring this to life. Special thanks to my wife, Lana, for putting up with all my writing nonsense and to both Matt "Grape Ape" Robertson and Ben Klima for their support and editorial genius. Lastly, I want to mention something to the great Peter Mullen who created the amazing cover for this project: Thanks for taking the time to do a little piece of art for a small guy among the big fish. My appreciation knows no bounds.

Check out the products page for more info on our first adventure.

Feast of the Cyclops Con and some BIG Announcements

 Greetings Adventurers! Well, I’m back. The surgery went well and now I’m recovering from a week in the hospital. I’m home now and it’s nearly been a month since my open-heart surgery. It’s been a rough road in recovery and I’m in a lot of pain, but it is manageable. It’s been a bit hard to concentrate and work on my writing but I’m getting better each day. Sadly, it’s also hard to paint minis due to the pain in my chest so that is on hold as well. The big news here at Hydra Hobbies is that I’ll be playtesting some upcoming adventures during the online Feast of the Cyclops Con put together by Goodman Games and my good friend GrapeApe. This means that the cat is out of the bag, and the BIG announcement is the first two products from Hydra Hobbies for DCC. The first being The Tower of the Mad Mage Mazdor™. It’s a first level adventure for DCC and will be the first product for HH. TMMM is fully written, laid out, has all the art complete, proofread, edited, and nearly ready for submission to GG. This will be the final playtest before publication. I’ll be putting up a product page soon here on the blog and it will include this one AND the next big announcement: The second product! 

The second product for HH will be The Dungeon of the Tormentor. This one will be a 2nd level adventure for DCC, and I’m nearly finished writing it. Feast of the Cyclops Con will be the first official playtest of this one (other than when it was run as a D&D 3.0 over 20 years ago.) Both adventures will have pre-gen characters available right here on the blog for those who sign up to play. I have the TMMM pre-gens complete and just need to set up the page here on the blog for them. I’ll be working on the pre-gens for DOT this week and should have those up soon as well. Hopefully I’ll finish writing DOT before Feast of the Cyclops Con that starts Nov 14th.  I would say I’m about 95% complete with the writing. I hope you will join me for this very inexpensive online convention hosted by Goodman Games.  If you do sign up for any of my games not only, will you get playtest credit, but I will send you a copy of the .pdf and a physical copy, upon approval from GG and publication. Registration is open and games are filling up, so if you do plan to attend, I suggest you sign up soon. I’ll be posting my review of the new D&D Starter Set: Heroes of the Borderlands soon and then after that I’ll have the review of the beautifully illustrated The Adventures of Conan tabletop game. AND a little teaser: The next review will be for a newly reprinted Space Empires 4x from GMT Games (and all three supplements) which I’ve punched out the chits and clipped them (well over a thousand chits!) I’ve gotten this one to the table and had a fun solo play. This game is deep and has so much to it, yet the rules are surprisingly simple. More on that later. 

Well brave adventurers there is lots to do, and the clock is ticking. I’ve got a whole lot of cardiac rehab ahead of me and in between that a lot of prep work to get these two playtests to the table. I hope to see you online for Feast of the Cyclops Con. Until then sharpen your sword and battleaxe and be ready to slay some enemies!

 DCC Day at Dragon’s Lair

Greetings adventurers! Saturday July 19th was Dungeon Crawl Classics Day. This is a celebration all things DCC (as well as Mutant and X-Crawl Classics) sponsored by Goodman Games. Taking place at FLGS across the world once a year Judges present special DCC adventures for any and all to come and play a little bit of DCC, and get some cool stuff. The event is run free of charge for those both experienced and brand new to DCC. This year I made it out to Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy here in Austin, TX for some DCC goodness. 

I planned carefully so that I could play in my new friend Matt “Grape Ape” Robertson’s DCC game and arrived early, perhaps too early as I found out the game would not start until some two hours later. 

Alas, I did some shopping and picked up some DCC day specials along with some great DCC adventures. I sat down and started to look over my new purchases and was soon joined by others ready to throw down some DCC action. 

Soon Grape Ape arrived and began his set up. I struck up some amazing conversations with my new acquaintances and we swapped many gaming stories before the game began. Three full tables eventually assembled for both DCC and MCC with ours being the first to fill up. Grape Ape is the Community Outreach Liaison at Goodman Games and lives nearby here in Texas (Check out his Rules as Written Podcast on the official Goodman Games You Tube channel.) We have met several times at various conventions and events but have never gamed together, until now. Judge Grape Ape ran The DCC Day special: The Key to Castle Whiterock and boy was it a hoot!

I’m not going to throw out any spoilers but in the end my character ended up dead and we didn’t get the Key to Castle Whiterock. I can’t say how much fun I had playing in Grape Ape’s game, I seriously felt like I was 12 years old again playing in my first Fantasy RPG adventures. Everyone had a great time, we got some great freebes from Goodman Games and some neat swag from Grape Ape for participating in the game. I must give shout outs to all the excellent players in our game. You guys are amazing. Kudos to Keith (Gosshus the Cleric who by far has the most deity disapproval I have seen in any game I’ve played in my entire life!), Chaz (our giant-sized Wizard), Tony (Jasper the gold and silver sniffin dwarf. I’ll reach out to you soon and hopefully we can start our own gongfarmer local!), Ryan (Haldr the elf devote of none other than Sezrekan himself. Maybe someday you can convince us to teleport 100 miles away from the dungeon!) and last, but not least, Hector (Wat the primitive warrior MVP who had the most Mighty Deeds and saved our skins more than once, in the end I know you tried to save me but smashed all your fingers, you can have Squire Bedford’s share of the treasure.) A special Thank You to Grape Ape for organizing this fantastic event and running such a great game (I am so going to steal your goblin voice in my next game.) To my fellow adventurers I salute you until we meet and adventure again.